Best 1141 quotes in «historical quotes» category

For historical currents do not irresistibly propel themselves and everyone in their path. No matter what their broader structural or ideological roots, they both carry along and are carried along by people, who are not merely passengers of history, but pilots as well.

For man as an historical creature has desires of indeterminate dimensions.

For many women, the experience of prostitution stems from the historical trauma of colonization.

For me archaeology is not a source of illustrations for written texts, but an independent source of historical information, with no less value and importance, sometimes more importance, that the written sources.

For me, it's always difficult when a historical film claims to depict or represent a reality that none of us can know, that is always different. It's always the case. We never know what happened then.

For me, the historical and genealogical library is the one I use. I'm working on, I'll say, it's a time travel novel. I haven't written very much of it. That's the dirty secret of the Cullman center: The writers don't write their fiction there, they just do their research.

For me, the challenge of a period film is that, unlike a contemporary film where the character can be very free-form when it comes to the acting, there's a burden to acting in a period film because you have to stay within the character's historical background and the gestures of certain periods.

For me, the original play becomes an historical document: This is where I was when I wrote it, and I have to move on now to something else.

For nearly two centuries, scholars and politicians have debated the future of capitalism. Its critics, most prominent among them Karl Marx, have seen capitalism as intrinsically unstable, full of contradictions that will lead eventually to its collapse. Its supporters see it as the best way to allocate resources and rewards. Some even hint that the democratic capitalistic society is not just a phase in the historical evolution of economic systems but its ultimate end.

For society as a whole, nothing comes as a "right" to which we are "entitled." Even bare subsistence has to be produced-and produced at a cost of heavy toil for much of human history. The only way anyone can have a right to something that has to be produced is to force someone else to produce it for him. The more things are provided as rights, the less the recipients have to work and the more others have to carry their load.

For the first time in the history of the world, every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the moment of conception until death.

For this reason poetry is something more philosophical and more worthy of serious attention than history.

For the sake of historical truth I must verify that only the Greeks, of all the adversaries who confronted us, fought with bold courage and highest disregard of death.

Fortifications, artillery, foreign aid - will be of no value, unless the ordinary soldier knows that it is HE guarding his country

For we cannot adequately understand 'man' as an isolated biological creature, as a bundle of reflexes or a set of instincts, as an 'intelligible field' or a system in and of itself. Whatever else he may be, man is a social and an historical actor who must be understood, if at all, in close and intricate interplay with social and historical structures

From a historical viewpoint, religion is just a kind of superstition, and from a political viewpoint it is a tool of social control.

Gentlemen, comrades, do not be concerned about all you hear about Glasnost and Perestroika and democracy in the coming years. They are primarily for outward consumption. There will be no significant internal changes in the Soviet Union, other than for cosmetic purposes. Our purpose is to disarm the Americans and let them fall asleep.

Further global progress is now possible only through a quest for universal consensus in the movement towards a new world order.

German dominance in the EU is a fact of life. But for historical reasons, it would be the last country to be swept away by a populist wave. And one thing is certain: If Germany goes down, Europe goes down, and with it all the values which we thought are worth living for. Germany has to be the champion of these values.

Good history is a question of survival. Without any past, we will deprive ourselves of the defining impression of our being.

Given the ambiguity of religious texts and teachings, the mixed historical record, and the empirical evidence, it would be foolhardy to assert that religious faith necessarily upholds democratic values.

God cannot alter the past, though historians can.

Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us.

Government can do something for the people only in proportion as it can do something to the people.

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.

Grape juice at the communion table symbolizes the historical impotence of Christ’s blood, Christ’s gospel, Christ’s church, and Christ’s expanding kingdom. Grape juice stays ‘bottled up’, confined to the historical skins of Palestine.

Great abilities are not requisite for an Historian; for in historical composition, all the greatest powers of the human mind are quiescent.

Happiness is more effectually dispensed to mankind under a republican form of government than any other.

Hemingway seems to be in a funny position. People nowadays can't identify with him closely as a member of their own generation, and he isn't yet historical.

Herschel Grynszpan's life was enigmatic, elusive and tragic. The traces he left on the historical record are just sufficient to tantalize and baffle historians. Harlan Greene has woven from these threads a riveting novel, erotic, haunting, and profoundly moving.

He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.

He who puts out his hand to stop the wheel of history will have his fingers crushed.

Historical explanation is not identical with moral judgment.

Historical analogy is the last refuge of people who can't grasp the current situation.

Historical methodology, as I see it, is a product of common sense applied to circumstances.

historical research of the truly scholastic kind is not connected with human beings at all. It is a pure study, like higher mathematics.

HISTORICAL SLUMMING: the act of visiting locations such as diners, smokestack industrial sites, rural villageslocations where time appears to have been frozen many years backso as to experience relief when one returns back to'the present'.

History distinguishes what is accidental and transitory in human nature from what is essential and immutable.

History has become more important than ever because of the to unprecedented ability of the historical sciences to take in man's life on earth as a whole.

History, in fact, is no more than a list of the crimes of humanity, human follies and accidents

History is a tool used by politicians to justify their intentions.

Historical research to this day remains unorganized, and the historian is expected to make his own instruments or do without them; and so with wooden ploughs we continue to draw lonely furrows, most successfully when we strike sand.

History is but the record of crimes and misfortunes. L'histoire n'est que le tableau des crimes et des malheurs

History is rooted in the future

History is the only laboratory we have in which to test the consequences of thought.

History knows no resting places and no plateaus

History remembers only the celebrated, genealogy remembers them all.

Historical determinism is a recipe for political quietism.

Historical experience is written in blood and iron.

Historical and public memory is not merely on the side of domination.